


Save Tonight (I'll Hold You Back)

by jane_potter



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Dark, Dysfunctional Relationships, Episode: s05e04 The End, Explicit Sexual Content, Human Castiel, M/M, Supernatural AU: Croatoan/End'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-24
Updated: 2011-11-24
Packaged: 2017-10-26 12:30:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after the end of the world, Dean and Castiel are on a hunt for the very last hope they have left. As Croatoan tears the planet apart, everything is falling to pieces, including Castiel, and there is not a thing left on Earth that was worth falling for except a man who grows less Righteous by the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [ddfic_challenge](http://ddfic-challenge.livejournal.com/) on LJ, for the lyrics " _I'm the only friend that makes you cry / You're a heart attack in black hair dye_."

Castiel can remember the creation of the material universe. He once knew the direct presence of God and the ecstasy of endless, boundless Love. He has seen empires rise and fall, seen species blossom and wither to dust, seen entire continents sheathed in ice and then reborn again, scraped raw and new.

He thinks he is about to die in the hot, airless confines of a rusted old car doing 90 miles an hour down a deserted South Dakota highway.

Castiel's stomach feels like its trying to turn itself inside out, and his eyes feel like they've been pounded four inches back into his skull with a dull hammer. Every shift of the Impala makes him want to-- he doesn't know what, doesn't understand this sensation, but he can't stand it. Something has climbed up into the back of his throat and jammed there, threatening to lurch out every time Castiel moves. He instinctively wants to keep it down, but at the same time he thinks this all might stop if he just gets it over with.

"Cas. Hey, Cas."

Dean's gruff voice breaks through from the driver's seat. Castiel doesn't open his eyes, concentrating on keeping his insides from reversing themselves.

"Cas," Dean insists. "Man, you okay?" Dean must have taken his eyes off the road, because the Impala sways a bit. "Cas. Say something!"

Castiel opens his mouth to tell Dean to make the car stop doing that, and then his body doubles up and convulses, his head snapping forward to retch nothing.

Dean swears and slams on the brakes, which squeal and shudder. Castiel's muscles spasm a second time, too hard for him to open his eyes, but then Dean is around his side of the car, yanking Castiel's door open and pulling him halfway out to retch again over the pavement. A thin stream of yellow bile is all that comes up.

Castiel manages to undo his seat belt, tries to step out of the car and ends up falling sideways against the door frame, head spinning.

Somewhere above him, Dean is calling him a stupid son of a bitch. The bracing hand on Castiel's shoulder leaves, and the Impala's frame jerks as Dean opens the back door and rummages around in the bags stowed in the back seat. A handful of protein bars are shoved under Castiel's nose a moment later.

"When the hell was the last time you ate?" demands Dean, worn too close to the bone to express anything but anger. He used to care when bad things happened to Castiel-- he might still care-- but he hasn't showed it in a long time.

Castiel stares at the bars. "I forgot," he says, after a long moment, dumbly surprised.

He's not an angel anymore. He has to eat now.

He wishes he still didn't remember.

Dean sighs, and it's... maybe not angry. Tired? Castiel takes the protein bars and doesn't look up, because if he's wrong and Dean's still mad-- worse yet, if he's got that broken expression on his face again-- Castiel doesn't want to see.

They both get back in the car, and Dean pulls back into the empty lane of traffic. The highway is deserted. They haven't seen another car or person in two days, which is-- well. Good, because anyone they see is likely to be a Croat. Bad, because that means everyone's either dead or a Croat.

Castiel wonders if he's ever going to stop feeling like someone has a fist around his esophagus when he has that thought, that sudden punching recollection that more than half the world's population is dead and one quarter of the United States is quarantine land. President Palin got unanimous congressional approval to seed the Canadian and Mexican borders with lethal anti-personnel mines just last week.

He blinks hard and takes a bite of a protein bar, struggling to keep breathing when it feels like there's a knife in his chest. His body is a sack of aches and awful sensations. "I'm sorry."

Dean is staring at the road. "We'll get you something else to eat at Bobby's."

His insides feel small and ashamed.  _ He _ feels small, weak and powerless and trapped inside Jimmy's body, like somebody has cut off all his limbs-- all the limbs that really matter-- and left him to scream inside the meat that remains to him. Needing Dean to hear it, to know that Castiel is  _ trying _ to do things right, he tries again. "I didn't mean to forget. I wasn't trying to just save more for you."

He did that once, two months ago. He passed out in the middle of looting an already-looted convenience store and woke up with Dean yelling in his face, looking more scared than Castiel had ever seen him. Afterwards, Dean didn't talk to him for a week.

But Dean seems to ignore him. "Should be at Bobby's in about an hour," is all he says, squinting down the highway. Castiel sighs and tries to ignore the way his throat still burns as he chews and swallows mechanically.

The sun beats down mercilessly overhead. The sky is a high, surreal blue that Castiel will never get used to seeing over a world that is now alternately empty and savage beyond belief. (He sat beside Dean on a park bench underneath a sky like this, once, on a day after the sky didn't rain fire.) They pass cars abandoned on the shoulders of the highway, in the ditches. Most of them sit with their doors hanging open, dark stains all over the seats and the windows and the pavement. At one point, Dean has to slow down to steer carefully around a large van that was left blocking half the highway. Castiel sits up straight with his window rolled down, tightly gripping a shotgun, in case somebody jumps out from behind the van as the Impala rolls slowly around it.

Nobody does. They drive on, and dead traffic gets worse as they get closer to Sioux Falls, at least until Dean takes the turn-off to Singer Salvage.

Castiel notices the way Dean's hands flex on the steering wheel, the hard set of his jaw that means he's grinding his teeth again.

"He'll be fine," Castiel says, and it's wrong, it's all wrong, but he has to say something. (Sam knew what to say right.) "Phone lines are down in most of this part of the state. He wasn't working alone."

Something-- just a little something-- goes out of Dean's shoulders. "Bet he's not too happy with half of Sioux Falls shacked up in his yard," says Dean, in a solid attempt at normalcy, the state they had three years ago that looks so good in comparison to what they have now.

Castiel manages a dry chuckle, remembering the way they had last left Bobby. About a year ago, a woman named Jodie Mills, the sheriff of Sioux Falls, had driven all the way up to Camp Chitaqua to demand Bobby's help ("From what I figure, you're pretty much the damn zombie apocalypse expert, Singer. We need you."). He'd ended up going back with her, and last they'd heard, he and Mills had set up Singer Salvage as a camp for survivors and civilians-turned-hunters as Croatoan swept through the Midwest.

Last they'd heard had been two months ago.

"I think he enjoys having people to call idjits," Castiel says.

"Yeah," agrees Dean, with the strained shadow of a laugh. "And that sheriff-- she's probably keeping 'em all in line."

Castiel nods. "Yes."

"Yeah," says Dean again.

The car falls silent. Thankfully, that's when they pull around the last bend before the salvage yard, brakes squealing as Dean slows.

The gates are hanging wide open.

"Oh, no," falls from Dean's mouth, and he punches the gas. Castiel scrambles to grab his shotgun from the back seat again, grabs a handful of extra shells and shoves them in the pocket of his coat-- the good pocket, not the one with a hole right through it. The Impala skids to a stop in the dust in front of the house, and Castiel barely has time to hand Dean his own shotgun before Dean is shoving his way out of the car.

"Dean, be careful," Castiel cautions, scanning the yard around them, the stacks of crushed cars and the rusting sheds. It's deserted. The tents that used to fill Bobby's yard are all ruined, nothing but shredded canvas flapping in the wind; one or two of the shanties of plywood and corrugated tin that were built up against the side of the house have been knocked over. The firepits are full of cold black ash and the sun is still shining overhead.

"No bodies," Dean mutters, moving up the porch steps. "Where the hell is everyone?"

"I'll go around back," Castiel volunteers quietly. His palms are sweating.

Dean's right. There are no bodies. There is blood-- a big pool of it in the dust just around the corner of the house, a splash on the peeling sky-blue clapboard.

"Bobby?" Castiel calls in a low voice, as he circles the back of the house. The back door hangs open. The sensation in his stomach-- it must be nausea-- is back, filling up his throat. "Bobby Singer?"

He steps cautiously into the kitchen, scalp prickling. It's distracting. His body never used to do things like that. "Bobby--"

Sudden movement has Castiel jerking to the right and lifting the shotgun, finger tight on the trigger, only to find himself staring at--

"You  _ idjit _ ," Bobby growls, lowering his own sawed off shotgun. He's missing his hat, and the front of his shirt is covered in blood; his withered legs list to one side of the chair. Castiel's heart pounds with relief. " What the hell you think you're doing, creeping around here?"

"Is it safe?"

"Hell no," snaps Bobby. "But as far as I know, there ain't no more Croats around right now, if that's what you're asking."

"Dean," Castiel calls, more loudly, his voice embarassingly shaky as the rush of stress hormones catches up with him. He  _ hates _ what his body does to him these days.

A moment later, Dean strides in from the front. "Bobby," he says, deep relief suffusing his face. "You're okay. I thought--" He stops, visibly pulls himself back together. "What the hell happened?"

"The hell you think," Bobby demands.

"Croats?"

"Lots of 'em."

Tentatively, Castiel asks, "And the others?"

"We killed everything that came at us," says the old hunter, sagging back in his chair. He looks old, and so very tired. "But lots of us got killed. Plenty more got infected. Only just finished burning 'em. Jodie and the rest that're left made a supply run to Sioux Falls while the way's clear."

Dean is frowning, on the edge of suspicion, like he can't quite put his finger on something. "Bobby, you okay? Anything... wrong?"

"No, half the people livin' here just got slaughtered and I'm peachy keen!" Bobby barks. There's a sullen silence in the kitchen before Bobby draws a steadying breath and says, "You didn't come all this way down here just to chat, Dean. What're you after?"

"We're--" Castiel stops and has to clear his throat, suddenly unable to put the idea into words. It makes him shake, makes him sick with hope. Bobby looks at him. "We're... going to find my Grace."

The idea came to him a week ago, at the funeral service of the woman who had handled much of the cooking detail at Camp Chitaqua. She had cut her wrists with a paring knife. Castiel spent much of the evening in a haze from the alcohol that had been passed around, grieving possibly more than anyone else-- not just for Julia, but for everyone  _ he _ had lost since the beginning of the end.

Saraquel, Miniel, Hadriel, Kuliel and countless others in the siege on the gates of Perdition. Uriel, whose death had gone cold and unmourned by the choirs of Heaven, leaving Castiel to his own conflicted misery. Anael, whose death had been a long, slow thing, begun with self-inflicted mutilation and ended in such a way that it had almost been a mercy to put her out of such pain. All the multitudes of voices that Castiel would never hear again, the particular hum and crackle of each angel's individual wavelengths, the tinted shine of Grace inside their interchangeable human vessels...

And then, in thinking of Anael-- Anna, who deserved to be remembered by the name she had chosen for herself, the choices she had been tortured to insanity for-- the thought occured to him. That his rise from Perdition had not been a delicate thing. That his raw and shrieking return to Earth had blasted down the trees of decades like so much dead wood, and surely could have flung off some small parts of his own flayed being. That somewhere, buried in the earth of the Righteous Man's grave, there might be a fragment of his Grace yet remaining.

Castiel is ashamed that he has never wanted anything so badly as this, the possibility that something may yet save him from the sticky, binding prison of Jimmy's flesh.

Bobby raises his eyebrows. "You think that's possible?"

"Cas thinks so," Dean says. Across the kitchen, Castiel meets his eyes for just a second, and there's something  _ there _ , something that's not awful and empty-- hope, it looks like hope in Dean's eyes, desperate and clinging as it is.

Castiel's heart leaps incredibly. He has put  _ hope _ into the eyes of the man who destroyed the world.  _ This _ is why Dean defended Castiel's suggestion of a road trip all the way up from Camp Chitaqua to South Dakota, on dangerous roads and with ever decreasing availability of gasoline. The idea of what Castiel will be able to do when he gets his Grace back is enough to make Dean believe again, believe in  _ Castiel _ again-- a Castiel who doesn't fail at the most basic tasks, who doesn't need help to accomplish things that children can do. Who doesn't need to be taken care of.

"Well, you ain't going on empty stomachs," Bobby announces. "Can't imagine you found much to eat on the way up here. I'll get you something."

Castiel's stomach grumbles out loud at that moment. He sees Dean crack a grin, and despite his flush of embarassment he can't help but make one in return, feeling suddenly lighter than he has in months. They're going to find his Grace, get it back, and Dean is smiling at him, and things will be better, things will be okay, he needs to believe that.

Bobby curses. "Damn thing's jammed," he says, jerking at the wheels of his chair. "Been busted for weeks. Can't-- get it to--"

Castiel puts his shotgun down on the kitchen table and strides over to help, smiling as he reaches out a hand. "Let me--"

It happens so fast.

The moment he's within arm's reach, Bobby slams the butt of his shotgun into Castiel's knee. There's a horrible noise and Castiel screams as it buckles from underneath him. The pain is horrible, bolts of shooting agony bright enough to make his vision grey. Suddenly Bobby has an iron grip on his wrist, hauling him forwards across the floor. Castiel drags like dead weight, reeling with nausea, and the fingers of his free hand scrabble at the floor, Bobby's boot, trying to gain purchase on anything as his vision spins. Dean is yelling, Castiel can't see anything straight (is he still screaming?), and Bobby-- there's the flash of a knife, aimed at Castiel's bare wrist ("--son of a bitch,  _ Bobby _ \-- Cas, move!"), a glimpse of Bobby's face transformed with rage--

The retort of Dean's hand gun explodes in Castiel's ears just as a second flare of pain shoots down his arm. Bobby's hand goes suddenly nerveless and Castiel collapses to the floor, moaning as he curls around his throbbing knee. There's blood pouring from a cut on his wrist.

Dean grabs him by the collar, hauling him upright. There's desperation in his face. "Cas? Cas! Is it infected?"

Castiel struggles to breathe again, to think past the pain that clogs up his limited little meat brain. "I-- no," he gasps, wrapping his other hand around his bleeding wrist and pushing his thumb against the pulsing veins between the bones of his arm, the way Risa showed him how to. "No, it's fine."

"Are you sure?"

"It's fine," Castiel repeats, more harshly than he meant to. But he can't, he can't handle anything except breathing without wanting to scream again, scream in pain and frustration and the bone-deep agony of being trapped in a form that goes no deeper than bones. A Castiel who still needs to be taken care of.

Something goes shuttered and brittle in Dean's eyes. His teeth grind hard and his hand falls from Castiel's collar and he stands up abruptly, and that's the moment when Castiel catches up with the realisation of what just happened. Slowly, like the bones of his neck have locked up, Castiel turns his head to look.

There's sunlight shining through the kitchen window, and Bobby's slumped in his wheelchair, head tipped back against the back of it and one hand dangling slackly over the armrest. There's a single neat hole in his chest and a dark, wet stain seeping down his already bloody shirt.

Shaking all over, Castiel pushes himself slowly to his feet, but once up, he can't reach out, doesn't dare to touch Dean. He knows he wouldn't be thanked for that. Dean just stands there, staring at Bobby's body with burning eyes. His pistol is still in his hand. Very minutely, his hands are trembling; his jaw clenches like he's trying to grind away his emotions through sheer force of will.

"We've got to bury him," Dean forces out finally, his voice a nearly unrecognisable grate. "I'll--"

He lifts one arm and then stops, hand hanging uselessly in midair. Dean's whole body wavers with the force of the grief trying to slam through the walls locked around his heart.

"I'll find a shovel," Castiel says, because he's learned how to be helpful.

Lift. Carry. Fetch. Run. The things a human does to be of use. Never smite. Never fly.

(Dean didn't like to fly with Castiel even back when he still could.)

It turns out they don't need to dig a grave. Near the treeline at the edge of the yard behind Bobby's house, a small backhoe stands next to a series of rectangular holes, six feet deep and three feet wide. There are five rectangles of bare, sunken earth where other graves have already been filled, headstones of scrap metal with names welded into them jutting from the earth.

One of the open holes is full of blackened bones and charred flesh. Castiel counts at least seven skulls, one of which is very, very small. In the trees just behind the backhoe, he finds more bodies-- whole and unburned, sticky with blood and crawling with flies. Sheriff Mills is among them.

Castiel doesn't cry, although he wants to be sick again because his stomach almost can't handle the stench. He just wonders how many people got away, and how many able-bodied Croats went after them.

A shovel in his hands, Castiel stands there helplessly as Dean carries Bobby out of the house, his body wrapped in an old bed sheet. Dean's face looks like it's carved from granite. He jumps down into an empty hole to lay Bobby down gently, then sloshes gasoline and salt all over. The hand Castiel offers to help him back up is ignored. Standing too close to the edge of the hole, Dean strikes a match and throws it down, not flinching as the flames roar up at his face.

The body burns hot, coils of greasy black smoke rising up into the bright sunlit sky. Castiel and Dean stand in silence for what feels like forever, waiting for the fire to burn down. The back of Castiel's neck starts to hurt; his legs ache from standing but he can't sit, not while Dean is still standing.

Finally the fire gutters low. Castiel is unable to look in the hole and see what's left, but he knows that even a rudimentary scorching is enough to consecrate the bones if there was salt in the fire. Bobby Singer will not return to this Earth.

"I can fill it in," Castiel volunteers, his voice low. He takes a cautious step forward. "If you would like."

Dean snatches the shovel from Castiel's surprised hands and attacks the pile of earth heaped up beside the hole.

Castiel licks his lips, feels the hole yawning in his chest. "Dean."

"Go back inside," Dean growls.

"I don't think I should."

"Jesus Christ, Cas, just go inside." Dean won't look at him; his back's turned, and he's hurling dirt into the hole with fast, savage swings of the shovel.

"If anything comes for you--"

"Then I'll shoot it!" Dean explodes, suddenly stabbing the shovel into the pile of dirt as if it's something he wants to kill. Castiel jumps. Dean still doesn't turn around, but his shoulders are hunched and hard like an animal with its hackles raised. "At least I know how to use a goddamn shotgun!"

So does Castiel. Bobby taught him how.

Castiel turns around and goes back into the house.

He does the things a human does to be of use. He grabs some of the empty duffels from the Impala and fills them from Bobby's pantry, taking canned meats and powdered soups and jars of homemade preserves from the stunted crab apple tree in Bobby's back yard. He takes two rolls of toilet paper from the downstairs bathroom, another from the one upstairs; he bangs on the false walls panels in the study and finds a stash of six more rolls in one hidden compartment.

There's laundry hanging to dry in Bobby's living room. Castiel loots the lines for what's most in need back at Camp Chitaqua: socks, underwear, jeans and sweaters. Shivering slightly in the damp air, he strips off in the living room and puts on a change of clean clothes that fit as best he can find. He pulls back on his boots and Jimmy's grubby, threadbare trench coat, leaving the rest of his dirty clothing in a pile on the floor.

(If he wears Jimmy's coat, then he's still wearing Jimmy's body, and it doesn't belong to Castiel.)

Upstairs, every bedroom contains at least three mattresses and all the detritus of occupation by people now dead. There are crayon portraits on the hallway walls. Castiel strips the beds of their sheets, noticing details against his will: the woman who left long blonde hair on the pillowslip of the rollaway cot was neat and made her bed tidily; the top bunk in another room was occupied by a teenage boy, judging by the fresh stains on the sheets that Castiel decides to leave behind. He folds up blankets as small as he can and jams them tight into the footwells of the Impala's back seat.

All of the books, Castiel decides to leave alone. He's read every single one that pertains to the Apocalypse, and in most cases he's actually the authority on what those books got right and wrong. He might be stripped and powerless, but the names of the prophets are still seared into his brain, as are the foretellings of the End of Days, the titles of every fallen angel of the First War and the maps of the labyrinthine fortresses of Hell. And the monsters-- the ordinary horrors that haunt the mythologies of mankind-- have been rapidly disappearing since Heaven closed its gates and left Lucifer to walk the planet with impunity. As have pollution and disease. Rivers are bursting through dams and factories are rusting away to nothing with unnatural speed, hastened on their way by floods and tornadoes that leave the land cleared.

Mankind isn't the only thing Lucifer intends to cleanse from the Earth. By the time humanity is gone, it's actually going to be a perfect world to live in. That thought has made Dean cry more than once, shoulders shaking with choke-throated sobs when he thinks Castiel is asleep.

Dean comes back in as Castiel is trying to zip shut a duffel bag crammed full of ammunition. He's filthy and sweating, red-rimmed around the eyes but obstinately stone-faced.

"You about done?"

"Yes," Castiel confirms, glad that he hurried. In the back of his mind, something wails for the fact that this kind of achievement is now the highest he can aspire to. He tries to ignore it.

Seeing the laundry hanging in the living room, Dean goes in to change, throwing his dirt-streaked shirts on the floor as he goes. Castiel made sure to leave a set of clothes Dean's size on the lines. When Castiel tries to wipe some of the grimy sweat off Dean's back with a kitchen towel, though, Dean throws Castiel's hands off with an angry shake of his shoulders. Like Castiel is a dog, shoved away for asking to play at an inopportune time.

Castiel feels his mouth pinch, and stands there with the cloth hanging uselessly in his hand to watch as Dean strips the rest of the way off. He takes in Dean's nudity with a kind of resentful hunger, wishing that he was making Dean uncomfortable and wishing that Dean was stripping for him at the same time. The muscles on Dean's back and shoulders work smoothly as he pulls on underwear and jeans, snorting at the fact that briefs are his only option. The sight stirs a longing pull in Castiel, makes him shift his stance so that the waistband of some dead stranger's damp jeans chafes a little.

Before leaving, they make a sweep of the salvage yard for any straggling Croats. Castiel's cut wrist throbs and stings under the stiff bandages.

He finds nothing except the bloodied body of a little girl, hanging half in and half out of a crushed car eight feet up in a stack. Castiel pokes her limp tiny hand with the tip of his shotgun, then pulls her down and slides his knife through her left eye, just to make sure.

His tongue feels leaden with the weight of prayers that he holds back against the push of instinct, because he has no desire of his own to call for his Father any longer, and Castiel's freedom to follow his desires is, apparently, what he gave up everything for. But how is it, how can it be that Castiel can be so thoroughly stripped of his powers and yet still so fundamentally compelled to fulfill the function for which he was created?

Shaking all over, Castiel walks back to the Impala on unsteady legs. He feels disconnected from his body. Then he lays eyes on Dean, leaning against the hard lines of the Impala's battered, muscular black body, and his entire being narrows down to that one sight, that one desire. He feels drained, dry, starved of something more important than food.

He can do whatever he wants now, can't he? So why isn't he doing-- anything? Why hasn't he gotten anything worth falling for?

Dean looks up at the sound of Castiel's footsteps. His eyes are exhausted, but his mouth is so very lush, Castiel realises distantly. Utterly intent, iron-cored and unwilling to be swayed by anything in the world, Castiel strides forward and opens his mouth to tell Dean exactly what he  _ wants _ .

Gruffly, Dean says, "Gear looks good. How much you get out of the medicine cabinet?"

Just like that, Castiel is derailed. He fumbles for words. "The..." He knows stem cells and hormones and gas exchanges and dendrites. He doesn't know human medicine. "I... found bandages. And a suturing kit."

"Yeah, okay, great," Dean says, a touch impatiently. "Penicillin? Peroxide? Morphine? Aspirin?"

At Castiel's blank stare, Dean's expression of tired annoyance morphs into sharp, sudden frustration.  _ "Dammit, _ Cas," he snaps, shoving off the side of the Impala to stalk back towards the house. "You didn't think maybe that was important?"

"I didn't know we needed-- I'll go find it."

Dean shoulders past him, his expression thunderous. "I'll get it," he growls. "No sense sending you off to come back with more fucking jam."

Standing alone in the empty yard, surrounded by the shattered fragments of the convictions that were so strong ten seconds ago and feeling suddenly more fragile than ever without them, Castiel stares after Dean. He's still shaking, and he's hungry, and the weight of Jimmy's trench coat is making him sweat in the bright afternoon sun.

After a long time, he gets in the Impala very carefully, bones aching as he settles stiff and uptight against the worn leather. Sam's presence breathes in the empty car. The deep, wide creases pressed into the seat cushion beneath Castiel's thighs remind him that he is very literally taken the place of someone to whom he will never compare, in Dean's eyes.

Rationally, Castiel knows that Dean's temper has nothing to do with him, and that it isn't his fault for not knowing what medical supplies Dean would want. He has no reason to know how humans bottle the cures to maladies that he can--  _ could once _ \-- repair on a sub-cellular level in a matter of seconds. This doesn't change the fact that he can't seem to make his humiliation-tight muscles relax, or that his throat is full of the burgeoning fear that Dean will come back and tell him to get his Fallen, human self out of the car.

He wonders if Dean's words will ever lose their power to pull him completely apart.

Five minutes later, Dean slings a plastic grocery bag full of small bottles that rattle and click into the back seat. The Impala rocks as he slides into the driver's seat and shuts his door, key clicking into the ignition. The engine labours for several long seconds before it starts with a growl, but the time it takes for that growl to catch makes Dean's face tighten, half wincing and dully dreading that this might be the time the Impala's old engine won't turn over.

It does. Dean's face relaxes back into dull exhaustion, his weariness deep in the lines around his eyes.

"It's going to be okay," Castiel says suddenly, uncontrollably. He hears the brittle, nearly manic edge of his own voice, how wrong it is in the heaviness between them, but he can't stop himself. "We are not far from your grave. We'll make it there in a couple of hours, and we'll find my Grace, and-- I'll get my Grace back. Once I can summon my sword again, I will be able to-- we can-- kill Lucifer. I'll be able to do that, Dean. We're--"

He takes a deep breath, trying to steady his trembling, clenching insides, to find the core of himself that  _ believes _ the way an angel should. "We're going to find my Grace."

"Yeah," says Dean quietly, "okay, Cas."

  



	2. Chapter 2

On the back roads off the main highway, everything is quieter and more still. They gradually stop seeing cars abandoned on the road. The chance that there are Croats in these woods gets less and less with every mile they drive from civilisation, although it can never be zero.

Metallica plays through the one crackling speaker that still works, distorted in some places by the cassette tape that's on its very last legs; every so often, Castiel has to reach forward and gently wind it through the most worn spots so that the tape doesn't snap completely. He does so very carefully, because this is one of the few cassettes that the Impala's deck hasn't eaten yet and Castiel is at least partially responsible for all the wear on "The Unforgiven."

Dean's hair ruffles in the breeze coming in through his open window, and sunlight through the trees that line the road dapples his skin. Lulled by warmth and the Impala's smooth motion, Castiel stares at the hand Dean grips the steering wheel with, the crooked bends of broken fingers and the muscles of his bared forearm, the pale blue tracery of veins and the smattering of freckles on his scarred knuckles. It's been over a year since Dean's watch stopped working, but the white band of a watch tan still circles his wrist like a manacle.

He looks down at Jimmy's hands. They've got calluses and scars, a rough scraping of scab across the back of one hand. Jimmy's hands used to be soft and unmarked, and had remained so for as long as Castiel had the power to keep his vessel pristine-- power that he'd used without even thinking about it.

He won't do that this time, Castiel tells himself. He'll keep the shreds of his Grace wrapped tight in a cocoon inside of his ribs, well away from the demands of the clinging flesh that would try to automatically leech energy from his Grace rather than depending on its own mitochondria.

Once, Castiel wore his Grace so close to the surface that he practically burst through the confines of Jimmy's skin without even trying, the wavelengths of his true form drawing electrical storms in his wake whenever he so much as stepped foot on the physical plane. Learning to tuck himself in tighter had been a trial, had felt like suffocation. He had tried not to follow Uriel's example of outright disdain for the limitations of the human form, insisting that surely the bodies were right for the creatures they had been designed for, but it had been difficult not to.

(He had no idea what true suffocation was, back then.)

Close to evening, they arrive at the place marked on a map Dean had taken out of Sam's journal, nothing but a little cross marked in red just off an old minor highway. The blacktop, once cracked with wear, is now fractures and choked with weeds; the ditches are full of warm, soupy brown water and weeds three feet high. Bees and crickets buzz in the woods that line either side of the road. Stepping out of the car and onto the soft gravel shoulder, Castiel frowns at the sense of wrongness that assails him until he realises what the problem is: there are birds singing. Birds don't sing in Croat territory. He hasn't heard them in weeks.

"Looks like the place," Dean says, hitching the strap of a duffel bag over his shoulder. "May as well camp here for the night."

Castiel isn't listening.

The sky is reddening incredibly in the west, the sun low enough that slits of bronze light shine directly through the trees and into Castiel's eyes as he squints around. Without a word, he starts walking into the trees, Jimmy's trench coat swishing through the long grass. He can hear his heart pounding in his ears.

Castiel knows this place.

Here. Here, where everything started.

Space and location had been completely immaterial in the depths of Perdition, time almost at much so. With Dean's soul thrashing in his grip, screaming in pain and rage at the towering, radiant creature that had snatched it up in a grip which could not help but burn and purify, Castiel had thundered up through the layers of Hell in frantic haste. The gossamer trailing wavelengths that translated to wings in the human perception had been snatched at by the demons pursuing him, torn to shreds by claws and snapping jaws; the core of his being had been raked by countless snatching talons, scraped raw as he twisted and soared through narrow, spiked tunnels of of pseudo-matter that Hell's environment was composed of.

Dean had done more damage than he knew, for he alone Castiel had not smote, nor even dared to shake in rebuke. Castiel had only gripped Dean tighter when his hold on the thrashing soul began to slip, sending incandescent veins of light splintering through the smeared grey rot on the surface of the soul, and hauled harder towards the pull he had been able to feel emanating from the Righteous Man's mortal shell even across the boundaries of the physical world.

So his lambent form had snapped through the last barrier between dimensions several miles below the crust, and broken through the surface of the earth with a sonic boom that had concussed thousands of tons of rock and soil. Up through the dirt, to the box of cheap pine buried just below the surface, now cracked almost to splinters from the shock wave...

Quivering with exhaustion, Castiel had wrapped Dean's now-limp and keening soul in the weft of his Grace, smoothing the worst-mauled threads of the soul back into a semblance of order. He had dug through the mass of decaying organic matter that had been Dean's body, reached into the bones and found several million cells whose nuclei had still contained good DNA, and from that pattern Castiel had reordered the heap of deteriorated molecules back into their proper forms, spinning muscle and tissue and fluids and hair, all of it new and untouched. The raw curl of soul had slid back in with a shudder, tied neatly back into its flesh with a thrill of vibration that had resonated on the frequency of Castiel's wavelengths for but a fraction of a second.

Shocked to his core by that infinitesimal moment of contact, Castiel had flung himself up from the earth and reached for the tie to his vessel, where he could tuck his Grace away, safely insulated from the grating oscillation of raw physical matter. The flayed shreds of his unprotected Grace had sung with agony against the billions of atoms that bounced through them, but still he had stretched out his Voice and cried with nothing but joy, _Dean Winchester is saved_.

He knows this place.

There is a great circle of dead trees, great trunks now greyed and cracking apart from years in the rain and snow. Moss and shelf fungi grow on the rotting wood. Castiel walks through the felled trees with something like detached wonder, for he had never seen with human eyes precisely what his return to Earth had done. Thistles and twigs crackle belowfoot, and then just the dry yellow grass that grows in the strong sunlight of the blast-stripped clearing. At the centre of the clearing, there is a place where the ground sags low and the splintery planks of a rudimentary cross tilt sideways. Hearing Dean's short, uneven breath behind him, Castiel stops at the foot of the empty grave.

Here.

He looks up, looks around, straining the withered remains of his Grace towards the land and the sky that he once cracked wide open. He feels-- nothing-- not nothing, something-- maybe--

To Castiel's left, the crown of one leafy green elm towers twenty feet above the forest canopy, leaves gilded in the light of the setting sun.

Legs shaking so hard that he can barely stand, Castiel makes his way doggedly towards the tree. He can't feel his fingertips, his feet; his whole body is buzzing. Here. Dean's eyes are like a weight on the back of his neck. The tree looms up like a titan, its lower half composed of the trunks of three separate trees fused into one, its branches spreading high overhead. _Here_.

Tingling from head to toe, Castiel reaches forward and presses his palms against the elm's rough grey bark. A shudder runs through him at the contact. His eyes slide shut of their own volition and his head tips forward, mouth falling open as his breath catches hard in his chest--

Very, very slowly, Castiel removes his hands from the tree.

Not here.

No, that makes sense. The fragments of his Grace must have been very small, very battered; no reason to assume that they spawned a colossus like Anna's miracle oak. Another tree. It's here somewhere.

He moves on to the next tree at random, heart hammering in his throat. The sense of dismay that grips him again is just as sudden and sharp as it was the first time, maybe worse. Moving like a drunk, Castiel fumbles to the next great tree, runs his palms across its craggy grey bark. He'll find it. Here.

Or here.

He doesn't know how long he searches for, moving from one tree to the next in a daze, his hands scraping across the knotted trunks of tree after tree, bark crumbling beneath his clawing fingers as he tries to dig his Grace out from inside. Eventually it comes to him that he's wandered quite far from the clearing, and the thought makes his heart leap back up into his chest like a rising star-- of course that's why he hasn't found anything, he's much too far away from the clearing. He needs to go back. It'll be back there.

He works his way back through the trees with feverish intent, zigzagging back and forth to touch every one, so consumed in his search that he almost doesn't notice when he trips and stumbles over the underbush. Thorns prick his legs; broken bits of detritus get into his boots and cut at his ankles. Castiel moves on, feeling nothing.

The sun is going down, sending long purple shadows through the woods. Castiel chokes back the lump rising in his throat, ignores the thing that is trying to scream out from the back of his mind. Not here. He reaches for the smaller trees as well as the big ones, now, the slippery-smooth saplings that whip and bend beneath his fingers. The aspens leave grainy white dust underneath his fingernails and on his palms; burrs stick to his shirt.

He can feel Dean following him at a distance, his presence like a brand that forces Castiel to keep moving. Dean, Dean is here, and Castiel has to do this for him, show him that Castiel was right, that he can still do things, that he can be powerful again, he has to.

No. No. Not the trees. If not the trees, then-- the rocks. Castiel's mind seizes on that thought, running at a frantic jitter. Obviously his Grace would have lodged in the rocks; he came out of the earth, so of course any pieces of it would have torn off there.

Castiel can hear his own breath coming like a frightened animal's, wheezy and unsteady. There is something in his chest, pressing and cracking against his ribs, but he cannot, he cannot-- he will die if he lets it out. He grits his teeth and scrapes his fingernails across the surface of a nearby boulder half sunken in the ground; dry lichens peel off and powder beneath his nails, but nothing else. No. Where-- the next one, where is it--

"Cas," says Dean's voice, gruff and so very low, harsh edges smoothed into an awkward approximation of gentleness. "Cas, c'mon. Cut it out."

Castiel staggers on his way to the next tree, driven by nothing but the dregs of determination; his outstretched palm skids across the bark. He can't help but let out a sharp cry at the pain that flares up from his bloodied hand.

Dean grabs his shoulder from behind. "Cas, that's enough."

The thing that has been scrabbling at the gates of Castiel's mind breaks free, sending a shock of ice water through his veins as the horrible realisation finally crashes over him. Stricken to his core, Castiel goes very still, numbness spreading through him. He can't move, can't breathe.

His Grace isn't here.

With the hand on his shoulder, Dean guides Castiel back to the clearing in silence, his touch surprisingly gentle. Castiel shakes like a leaf. Numbed, he lets Dean push him down on the sleeping bag that's been unrolled on the dry, grassy earth. Without speaking, Dean kneels down at Castiel's feet and unlaces his boots, pulls off the socks that are full of bits of moss and broken twig. Distantly, Castiel realises can't think of the last time Dean took so much care with him.

Staring at the torn skin and dried blood crusted on the knuckles of the hands that lie limply in his lap, Castiel sits hunched over on the sleeping bag as Dean cuts a circle of Anasazi symbols in the dirt around their camp, then pours salt over them. The heat of the day is fading as the blue light of evening creeps over the campsite. Through the trees, frog trills rise in thready chorus from the muddy ditch beside the road.

Next to Castiel, Dean grabs a bundled up sleeping bag and starts to shake it out. Something inside Castiel snaps.

He reaches out abruptly, grabbing Dean's wrist. Dean looks down at him, deep lines around his eyes, but Castiel doesn't give him a chance to speak. Lurching up on his knees, he hooks his fingers in the pocket of Dean's jeans, trying to pull Dean down. He has no idea what the expression on his face must look like, but whatever Dean sees, it makes him give. He goes down on his knees next to Castiel, and Castiel drags hungrily at him, fistfuls of t-shirt and flannel, pulling and squirming backwards until Dean is on top of him.

"Wait," gasps Dean, reaching out sideways. Castiel hears but can't understand, doesn't comprehend what Dean means to do, so he hangs desperately on to Dean's shirt until Dean wraps an arm around his waist and bodily lifts him over to the other sleeping bag beside them, which is unzipped and open, bigger. In a tangle of limbs and clothes, they squirm across the sleeping bag sideways. Castiel's hair sticks and drags against the cotton lining, but he's consumed with Dean, Dean's mouth, Dean's throat beneath his lips and tongue.

Dean groans, sounding wretched and tired. "Cas..."

"No," Castiel mutters, feeling the way his whole body shakes violently. "Dean, _please_."

Dean's weight crushes down on him, arms and chest and hips, as Dean puts his teeth to Castiel's throat, nose rubbing against his scruffy jawline. Castiel hasn't shaved in almost two weeks, and Dean has three-day stubble that burns the soft skin of his neck.

Dean pushes at Castiel's clothing, the grimy fabric of Jimmy's trench coat rustling loudly. Castiel pushes himself into a partial sitting position, enough to drags his arms free of the trench coat. The moment he's pulled his hands out of the sleeves, Dean shoves him back down on the ground with a thump, savaging Castiel's mouth with his own. Castiel makes a noise that could be a moan or a sob, but he can't deny the electricity skittering down his spine. This. This is exactly what he needs. He needs this. He needs more.

Castiel slides his hands beneath Dean's t-shirt, his battered fingers clutching at Dean's back and sides until Dean drags it off and tosses it to the side. His own shirt gets rucked up his belly but not removed, not with the way Dean is grinding down on top of him, their hips rocking together.

"Stop," Castiel forces out, his voice wrecked. "I need-- I have to--" His hands fumble at the button of his jeans.

Something in Dean's face breaks with sympathy. "Cas, no. You don't-- hell, we shouldn't. Not with--"

" _No_ ," cries Castiel desperately. "I need to. Dean, I. Need you to--"

He doesn't know what it is about his voice, his face, that makes Dean give in again-- or maybe it's not him, maybe it's just the five weeks since the last time they touched each other (that is, if Dean hasn't been seeing other people at Camp Chitaqua: Castiel knows some of the women want him, and he would-- would understand if Dean liked them better). Still, Dean helps pull Castiel's jeans down his legs and off.

Castiel shivers, not entirely from the cool of the evening air. He tries to get a hold of Dean's fly, but Dean pushes his weight down on top of him, holding him still despite Castiel's choking, protesting struggles. If he doesn't touch, can't move-- if there's nothing to drown out the screaming in the back of Castiel's head-- but Dean slips one hand into Castiel's boxers to slowly rub his cock, and, with the other, cups Castiel's jaw and tips his head back to kiss him, lips moving against his so very gently.

Suffering mutely under the gentle touch, Castiel shudders and squirms as Dean slowly rubs him to hardness, trying to hitch his hips higher, harder. He needs hunger, needs blood, needs shoving and panting and rutting enough to make him _forget_ that Jimmy's body is now _Castiel's_ body, nobody else's, not something he can pretend doesn't belong to him in order to make the reality of it less hideous. He needs-- he needs--

Dean's cock is a hard bulge pushing against the line of his zipper, heavy through the denim of his jeans. With one hand, Castiel manages to edge Dean's zipper down, making muffled whimpering noises against Dean's mouth. Dean hitches his hips with a grunt, bucking against Castiel's hand, but he keeps holding Castiel down, kissing him slowly and thoroughly and so gently that Castiel wants to die.

It didn't used to be like this. It wasn't like this the first time Dean took him to bed, back when Castiel was still an angel. Dean had been stumbling and wanting and appalled at his own wanting, Castiel bemused by all of this until the touch of Dean's hands had first sent electricity arching across his skin-- not a touch to his penis or buttocks or mouth, but to the small of his back as Dean untucked Jimmy's shirt, callused fingers pressing against soft flesh and vertebrae hidden just below the surface. It wasn't like this when Dean shuddered and came with the head of his cock between Castiel's lips, his whole body strained with the effort of being so careful and trying desperately not to buck his hips. It wasn't like this when Castiel had his first orgasm ten minutes later, so overwhelmed by the confident, deliberate slide of Dean's lube-slick palm over his cock that he had surrendered, quivering, to the crescendo of pleasure and come all over Dean's hip without realising what had happened until Dean had finally stopped kissing the shocked, incoherent yelping out of Castiel's mouth.

 _What was that?_ Castiel had asked, wide-eyed and shaking.

Dean had thrown his head back and laughed, his skin damp and glowing with sweat, eyes brighter than Castiel had ever seen them. _That was the whole point_ , he'd said, lowering himself down to lay slack and satiated on the bed next to Castiel. _Pretty good, huh?_

Now Dean mutters something beneath his breath and finally hitches his hips down against Castiel, the bulge of his cock riding the arch of Castiel's hipbone. Panting like an animal, Castiel digs his fingernails into Dean's back in an attempt to urge him onwards.

It works, thank god it works; Castiel could almost cry. Dean pops the button of his jeans, managing to shove them down around his knees without getting off of Castiel. His cock hangs hard and heavy between his legs, curving up towards his belly a little. Castiel slides a thumb across the head of it and draws a shudder from Dean. Swearing beneath his breath, Dean tucks his head in the crook of Castiel's shoulder and kisses him there while Castiel rubs and strokes.

"Now. Dean, now."

"I don't have any--"

"I don't _care_ ," Castiel cries in frustration, driven to what feels like insanity. "I-- want--"

He knows what he _wants_ , and it's not this. But this is all he's got, all he can get, and it's what he needs. He needs Dean, needs to remember why falling was worth it (was it worth it?), why he ever thought that this sad and dying world was important enough to lose anything for, let alone everything.

One of Dean's big hands wraps around his thigh to guide it as Castiel spreads his legs open, lifting his knees and putting his feet flat on the sleeping bag. Dean's fingers circle at his entrance for a moment, warm and slick with saliva, before one pushes in, then a second. Castiel huffs and shoves his hips back against the burn of it, his eyes shut tight. When he spits on his palm and jerks Dean's cock faster, Dean gives a stifled growl and shoves his fingers in harder. Spread wide open on Dean's fingers, Castiel gasps for breath, head tilting with vertigo even though he's flat on his back.

He has to wait as Dean fingers him, seconds spiralling out to eternity with the breakdown roaring in Castiel's ears almost loud enough to drown out everything else. Then, finally, Dean's cock is sinking into him one slow inch at a time, heavy and thick, not quite slick enough, but the raw burn of it is good, good-- it's a pain that Castiel has control over, an abuse he chooses to put his body through, not something foisted on him. The stretch and ache wash over him, hot counterpoint to the pleasure from Dean's hand curling around Castiel's cock and stroking it, hard short jerks as Dean's hips start to thrust against him.

Both of his knees hooked over Dean's straddled thighs to lift his hips, Castiel squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and arches his back into the rhythmic rocking. He can hear himself making animal noises that he hasn't got the self-control to stifle. Blood pounds in his ears and Castiel sinks into the wash of sensation, pleasure-pain-movement, until it feels as though he's starting to float loose from his body. He lets it take him.

Here. Here. He is falling apart, Dean is taking him apart, pulling Castiel out of the stifling shell of Jimmy's meat. He feels everything as if from a distance, light-headed and dizzy. He can smell the dirt and sour sweat on Dean's skin, the cleaner salt of fresh perspiration; he can hear his own breath gasping through his open mouth, whining on every exhale, and the grunt of Dean's effort; he can feel the rocks on the ground beneath the sleeping bag and the heat of Dean against him and on top of him and inside him, moving him, moving with him, holding Castiel tight and fucking him hard.

Castiel comes in a shaking, shuddering mess, releasing a wrecked cry into the purple night air. Slick with Castiel's semen, Dean's hand hits the dirt next to Castiel's head, giving Dean the balance and leverage to thrust into him even harder, his hips sawing out a ragged, stuttering cadence. Castiel's eyes drift open, dazed and floating in the aftermath even as his body still rocks in time with Dean's, moved by the force of Dean's thrusts.

Sweat beading on his face, Dean drops to his elbows. His eyes are shut tight, face clenched with concentration, and the stars are starting to come out in the navy-purple sky above. His clean hand worms its way behind Castiel's head and curls around the nape of his neck to grip tight, fingerstips digging in hard just as Dean comes, back arched, eyes shut, his forehead almost touching Castiel's.

Dean collapses halfway on top of him, the one arm still stuck out to hold his weight partially up. He fumbles to drag his jeans back up from around his ankles, muttering something beneath his breath.

Castiel clamps his eyes closed again, trying to hold onto the weightless sensation, but it's already fading, fading, leaving him solidly back in his body. He's sweating and sticky, shivering in the night air; his back hurts where there are pebbles digging into it and his legs are cramped from being hooked over Dean's hips. His ass hurts and the cut on his wrist throbs and his hair is sticking to his face and he's _hungry_.

Castiel doesn't know when he starts to cry, just that he ends up lying limply in Dean's arms with his face buried against Dean's neck, sobbing so hard that he can hardly breathe. Dean wraps heavy arms around Castiel and pulls him closer, utterly silent as he tucks Castiel's head tight under his chin and holds him there, rocking back and forth just barely, maybe by instinct. He doesn't say anything, nothing at all, but the crushing strength of his grip is enough to tell Castiel, through the haze of anguish that cripples his mind, that Dean is in anguish of his own.

* * *

In the morning, Dean wakes up to a leaden sky. He doesn't smell rain on the air, not yet, but the chilly temperature and grey spread of low clouds covering the entire sky promise it soon. Cold air leaks in beneath the edges of the second unzipped sleeping bag that he pulled over Cas and himself last night, and one foot is icy where it poked out from underneath. Cas is still asleep in his arms, his hair sticking up all over the place in a staticky mess. There's something very fragile about Cas's face in slumber, when it's not hardened by waking pragmatism and misery.

Carefully, Dean disentangles himself from Castiel, knowing from experience that Cas can sleep through almost anything. After all, he hasn't had time to develop waking reflexes, not in the two years he's needed sleep for. Cas stirs fretfully and mutters, probably more from the loss of body heat than anything, but doesn't wake as Dean tucks the sleeping bag back tight around him.

Dean makes sure to leave a shotgun on the sleeping bag right next to Cas, then stands up and stretches. His back is tight and full of knots from the hard ground. He shivers, but it's not entirely due to standing there in the morning chill with no more than two layers of shirts on. He just spent the night sleeping twenty feet away from the hole that used to be his goddamn _grave_.

He walks back to the Impala at a brisk pace with the weapons bag slung over his shoulder, keeping an automatic eye out through the trees around him in the misty early morning light. He stows the guns in the trunk, making sure to leave the bag unzipped for easy access.

Out of the bags piled in the back seat, he grabs a couple of the homemade muffins Cas had taken from Bobby's kitchen, devouring half of one in a matter of seconds. Then, so that he doesn't forget-- hell, so that _neither_ of them forgets, what with that fuck up yesterday-- Dean snatches a handful of protein bars from another bag and shoves them in his pocket for Cas.

He's gotta take care of his angel, now. He can't _not_ , not with everything Cas gave up just because Dean goddamn stumbled into his life and _asked_ him to, with no idea what he was asking or where it would leave Cas stranded. That thing Cas had once been, that creature of strength and might and utter, unshakeable conviction-- it makes Dean choke and want to die, that he'd been the one to take that away from Cas, that he was the reason Cas was down here suffering with the rest of the goddamn planet Dean had fucked over. He owes Cas at least enough to make sure he gets fed properly, the stupid helpless heart-breaking moron.

And the memory of Cas passing out in that convenience store, just keeling over onto the floor with his skin almost as sallow as the dingy grey tiles-- and Cas laying curled up on the floor of Bobby's kitchen, making those involuntary animal noises of pain with his wrist laid wide open, veins open to the virus-- no. No. Dean remembers that and he can barely see straight beyond the _no_ that reverberates through his bones, the screaming rejection of the idea of losing Cas. Cas is his, has always been his. And now-- with Bobby-- Cas is the only thing he has left, and Dean-- just-- cannot.

He thought he couldn't stand to lose Sam-- he went to Hell to not lose Sam-- but when it all came down to "yes" and there was nothing left in the world that could get Sammy back, Cas dragged him past that. And now Dean knows that Cas is the absolute limit of what he _cannot_ lose.

(The idea floats in the darkness at the back of his skull, of what he'll be if it ever turns out that existing after Cas, without Cas, is an option after all. It's an idea with black eyes and a scalpel in its hand, which is what Dean may as well be if he ever goes that far off the pier. Again.)

He owes Cas. He owns Cas. He doesn't know which, or which is more.

Cas is stirring when he gets back to the clearing, eyes squinted against the bright grey cloud-light. "Hey," Dean says, and goes over to toss the handful of protein bars on the sleeping bag beside the shotgun. He shouldn't be giving Cas those, considering they're full of preservatives and that's not something easy to find for emergency supplies any more, but he trusts the nutrient balance in them more than he trusts a couple of muffins and some apple preserves.

Cas sits up but doesn't look at Dean, instead staring blankly across the clearing. Something about his eyes makes him look very lost, something beyond the shadows and hunger-hollows that Dean really should have seen earlier.

Dean can't watch it. He turns away and walks back to the treeline, unzipping his jeans as his bladder makes its protests known for the third time that morning. When he's got his junk out, though, nothing comes. Lip bitten in frustration, Dean shuts his eyes and tries to relax.

Behind him, he can hear Cas folding up one of the sleeping bags, shaking the dirt and dried grass off it. The dry hiss of wind rustling the tall yellow grass fills the clearing, along with the muted slapping of leaves against tree branches. There's the occasional creak of a pine swaying too far in the breeze, the rattle of some dead tree's twigs.

It takes him far too damn long to realise what the problem is.

He doesn't hear the sounds of anything alive in the forest except himself and Cas. No crickets, no frogs, not a single bird.

A sudden shudder crawls down Dean's spine as every hair on the back of his neck lifts, so hard that it's right on the edge of painful.

Shoving himself back in his pants, Dean whirls around, trying to remember which direction is the shortest straight line to Sioux Falls, to the closest town, but with the clouds blocking all shadows he can't tell which way is which. Just as it comes to him-- south-east-- he sees the movement in the trees across the clearing and he knows it's too late.

Cas's head snaps up at just that moment, and he dives for the shotgun on the ground even before he could possibly have processed more than _someone there_. He jerks upright with the gun in hand, his whole body jolting with shock at the sight: ten, twelve Croats crashing through the dense underbrush towards them, not bothering with stealth, just insane from hunger and rage.

Cursing, Dean turns and sprints for the Impala, knowing immediately that the six bullets he has in the pistol at his belt are not going to cut it at all. He wouldn't want to go up against this many Croats with anything short of a group of fully armed hunters, four or five at least. If it's just him and Cas, a pistol and a shotgun between them--

And then Dean looks back and nearly has a heart attack. Cas isn't running, hasn't moved an inch; he's just standing there in the middle of the clearing facing the Croats with the shotgun dangling loosely in one hand as they come sprinting towards him, and it's just Cas and the shotgun and he's _not moving_ \--

\--and the air around Cas wavers and congests and then splits apart as huge black shadows flare out from Cas's spine, shadows without a source, shadows-- no, wings, wings the colour of smoke-streaked glass that gleam in the overcast daylight and stretch huge towards the leaden sky like pyroclastic thunderheads. For just a second Dean sees an _angel_ again, not a half-broken stranger in a grimy trench coat, and he could nearly cry because this has got to be the absolute _last_ of what power Cas still clings to.

"Jesus Christ, Cas!" Dean screams, one ankle nearly twisting as he skids to a stop. "Come _on_!"

Cas looks back over his shoulder, eyes widening. "No, Dean, go!" he yells, and the fucking Croats are _still coming_. "I can give you time to--"

"Son of a bitch!" Dean roars, and he's not sure whether it's fury or absolute cold terror that's gripping him as he sprints back across the clearing towards Cas, who now looks utterly dismayed.

"No, Dean--"

Dean raises his pistol and fires without aiming at all, and one of the Croats farther back in the pack actually collapses with a shriek, clutching her leg. Suddenly seeming to come back to the reality that there are fucking monsters about to rip his throat out, Cas jerks around to face the Croats again, somehow bringing up the shotgun just in time to slam the butt of it against the skull of the Croat that's nearly on top of him. Dean's there a second later, shoots it twice in the face even as he's grabbing Cas' wrist and yanking him away.

"No--" Cas says, sounding wretched, but he doesn't stop sprinting back towards the Impala with his wrist still in Dean's grip. Stupid son of a bitch, stupid fucking angel-- maybe he realises that all he's going to accomplish by trying to get away from Dean is getting Dean killed too, and evidently that's not what Cas wants out of his goddamn suicide, so he runs.

Branches slap at their faces as they crash through the trees, the Croats screeching on their heels. They get across the ditch in a clumsy half hurdle, the watery mud at the bottom sucking at their boots as they claw their way up the opposite side.

The Croats are right behind them and they can't slow down to get in the car properly. With the grip he has on Cas's wrist, Dean slams Cas right into the passenger side door, letting go just in time to fling himself across the hood to the driver's side, ignoring the way his knee bangs into the hood hard enough to leave a dent. Knee throbbing with pain, he curses and scrambles into the Impala, jamming the key in and wrenching it so hard that the ignition grinds horribly for a moment before he lets go, lets the engine roar to life.

Cas's own entry left him sprawled sideways across the seat, panting and clutching his shotgun. Dean's elbow knocks against Cas's head as he reaches for the gearshift, slams the Impala into gear and floors it just as the first Croat's nails scrap against the paint of Cas's door. The tires chew dirt and then catch; the undercarriage slams against the edge of the pavement as the car lurches onto the road at forty miles an hour, bouncing Cas's head against the dash.

Hands white-knuckled on the wheel, Dean keeps the pedal on the floor and his eyes hard on the road ahead, determinedly not looking into the rear-view at the howling mob rapidly disappearing behind them.

* * *

Castiel pulls himself upright in the seat, panting and light-headed. The shotgun on his lap thunks sideways into the footwell. Dean's mouth flattens into a thin line, locked hard over everything that wants to come out like his silence is the only thing that keeps him from homicide.

They drive, engine hammering as fast as it goes, bits of gravel cracking against the Impala's exterior and undercarriage so hard that Castiel thinks Dean is surely going to slow down any moment, any second, but he doesn't. The sight of the trees rushing by in a grey-green blur is enough to make Castiel's stomach lurch, not because they are going so fast-- they are not; 110 miles an hour is a snail's pace-- but because the Impala is bound to rupture something important at this speed, break and roll and crush both of their fragile little meat suits.

His head is swimming. He does not understand anything that just happened, only that somehow, he is sitting here in Jimmy's sour-smelling trench coat and listening to blood thunder through the squishy channels of his veins, feeling the shaky-sick shock of stress hormones wreaking havoc on his brain.

A whine builds at the back of Castiel's throat, wretched and heartbroken. "I could have done it," he chokes out into the silence, gravel-choked in his betrayal. How can Dean have done this to him? Doesn't he _know_ the future Castiel has been condemned to? "I could have--"

"Could have fucking what?" demands Dean at a roar, his eyes flashing over to Cas, full of what looks like the creeping edge of hysteria beneath the fury.

"Damn you," Castiel bites out, meaning every literal syllable of it with more fervency than he has ever meant anything. He has seen Dean shoot a child in the face, spray holy water all over a demon possessing a pregnant woman until she screamed and sizzled, and he can't understand how Dean decided to save Castiel's life over theirs. After everything Castiel has done for Dean, everything he has given up and lost-- this is cruelty unlike Castiel has ever known and he cannot possibly deserve it.

Misery makes his mouth run without thinking, draws the words out like poison from a wound. "Why didn't you leave? Why couldn't you have just let me die?"

Dean hauls off from the steering wheel and punches Castiel in the nose.

The Impala swerves violently across the highway. Sudden loss of momentum slams Castiel's skull back against the headrest as Dean stomps on the brakes, sending the car into a barely controlled fishtail and filling the air with the stink of burning rubber.

Stunned into wide-eyed silence, Castiel holds his hands over his nose as blood drips down his upper lip and onto the lapel of Jimmy's grimy trench coat. He quivers with utter shock.

Dean _hit_ him.

“You don't get to leave me!” Dean yells. “You don't get to decide that, Cas!”

But all Castiel can gasp out in pathetic astonishment is, "It hurts," his voice weirdly high-pitched with shock and wet from the blood he's swallowed. The tremble in his hands is starting to deepen, turning into an all-out shake.

"It hurts," he bleats again, helplessly, as tears well up in his eyes. "Dean, it _hurts_."

And it's not so much that the pain is bad as that he's feeling pain _at all_ , that Castiel got hit in the face and it didn't break Dean's hand, that he has no power to stop the blood still pouring from his nose, that this body is a clinging wet suffocating prison that Castiel is going to be trapped in for the rest of his life-- or at least until he dies horribly, shot and writhing in useless agony, or coughing his lungs up in bed like the old man that died at Camp Chitaqua three months ago. The agony is soul deep, because this is it, this is the rest of Castiel's existence, and his body will continue to bleed and break and piss and wear down until it's over and he will never, ever touch Heaven again.

Hunched over in Sam's seat with his hands still held over his bleeding nose, Castiel starts to cry again, a slow, miserable leak of tears that come from a place of misery so profound that he can do nothing except sit and shudder with the force of it.

“It hurts,” he whispers, paper-thin and begging Dean to understand.

Dean looks deeply uncomfortable, uncertain what to do, some shadow of guilt clinging over his face that Castiel has no strength to care about. He lifts a hand towards Castiel, falters, and drops it. Finally, after an eternity of leaden silence, Dean visibly gives up on his struggle to cope with Castiel's misery. He pops open the glove compartment and pulls out a plastic bottle whose contents rattle loudly. The label reads 'Vicodin'.

“Take these,” he says gruffly, tipping two large white pills into his palm. It is not an apology, but it is still the closest Dean will ever come to saying sorry to the not-Sam person who is sitting in Sam's seat.

“What is it?” Castiel asks dully. All the energy has drained out of him. He doesn't even care what Dean answers.

“It'll help the pain.”

Castiel almost doesn't believe that, but the very last thread of fealty within him makes him trust what Dean says. He takes the pills with shaking fingers, pushes them past his lips and swallows, bitterness mingling with the taste of blood in his mouth on the way down.

Dean puts the Impala back into gear and presses the gas more slowly this time, easing the car back into the proper lane and putting the Croats farther behind them once again. The sky hangs low and leaden overhead, bruise-black shadows in the distance threatening rain and worse.

Castiel shuts his eyes and waits for the pain to stop.

  



End file.
